Since time immemorial, man has always loved to travel and share his experiences with others. In recent days, this sharing of information has taken a digital turn and gave rise to the concept of travel blogs.Broadly speaking, there are two types of travel bloggers.
The first lot are travel enthusiasts who pursue traveling as a hobby and their blogs do not generate any return. A professional travel blogger picks out unexplored destinations and brings them to the notice of their social media followers. This is done in a way so that the travel expense incurred can be monetized from the blog.
Considering that a good fraction of tourists look up a place online before scheduling a trip, there is the immense potential of generating profit from ads if your travel blog has ample reach. Considering the number of travel blogs mushrooming each day and the immense competition in the field, you need to have a well-defined marketing strategy in place to attract views. In this article, we shall discuss some tips that will aid you in increasing the popularity of your travel blog.
Give People Something to Remember You By
Position yourself as a layman and make a list of the things that you would want to see from an ideal travel blogger. Sit back and evaluate whether your current platform satisfies all the criteria in the list. In case there is any gap, look for ways in which you can bridge the same and deliver quality content to your viewers.
Deliver Content that People Want to See
While conventional blogs are more about telling a story, travel blogs are most effective when the story is told with the aid of high-quality images, videos, or podcasts. Depending on the stage of travel they are in, a different form of travel content will appeal to your viewers.
Planning
This is the first stage wherein a viewer who is planning a trip to a particular destination comes to your social media page for facts about the culture of the place, things to see there, and the tentative budget that will be required for the travel. You should come up with informative blogs with quality pictures that will help them chalk the itinerary.
Shopping
Once the travel plans take shape, a traveler makes travel books, hotel reservations, and purchases for the upcoming trip. If your travel blog has posted on cost-cutting tips, camping ideas, travel safety tools, etc it will catch the attention of people who are at this stage.
Traveling
At this point, your audience is already in their journey and picture-filled blogs will help them have realistic expectations from the journey. Podcasts and videos that share your personal experience will be things that they will appreciate the most here.
Give a Personal Touch to your Travel Tales
The golden rule of travel marketing is the fact that travel storytelling is more about the journey than the destination. When you are writing about a journey, talk about the emotions you experienced at its different stages. If you are writing promotional content, make sure that it has some travel information, personal anecdote, or humor in addition to the conventional CTAs.
That way, the audience will be able to relate to your travels and enjoy your posts. This will increase their chances of reacting to the CTAs in the way that you would want. You can take this a step further by encouraging them to comment on their take on your blogs as that will foster engagement and improve the popularity of your travel brand.
Explore Different Social Media Platforms
With so many social media platforms available, your marketing strategy needs to be diversified to drive traffic from different media. For a travel blogger, it is important to have a noticeable presence on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram if they are keen to make a living off their travels. You also need to know what type of content you must post in each of these platforms to leverage their full potential.
Twitter requires you to be knowledgeable and share your content in as few words as possible. As a travel blogger, you can use this medium to give a live-feed of your travels wherein you update the different stages of your journey in real-time tweets.
Instagram is a photo-centric social media platform and an ideal place for travel bloggers. The key to making the most of your Instagram feed is by planning your posts by coming up with several repositories of your travel journals. That way, you strategically space your good travel pictures so that your feed can maintain its quality.
YouTube
As of 2020, video is the most-consumed form of content, and travel bloggers can use YouTube for their video marketing. The videos may range from those helping viewers with the planning and preparation to that of the actual travel. There are several online video editing software that you can use to edit time-lapse videos, city tours, and cuisine based travel videos to perfection.
Being the oldest social media platform on the list, Facebook has the largest audience, and that should be enough encouragement for you to include this as a part of your social media marketing strategy. Since Facebook supports multiple formats, you have the luxury of posting content in multiple formats.
Pay special attention not to abuse this privilege and restrict sharing only the best of your content on your Facebook page. You can also look for different travel-related Facebook groups where you can share your posts. Such groups often have millions of followers and will go a long way in increasing your reach.
Have a Lead Capturing Strategy for your Blog
To gather good leads, start segregating your audience into subgroups based on their likes. Then, create different email marketing lists for each of the subgroups and share relevant articles with them. Occasionally sending out personalized emails to your followers asking them feedback on your blog or video content is an effective way of building relationships.
While sending them emails, come up with an interesting subject that is devoid of spam words like ‘Free’ or ‘Offer’. Such words may steer the email to the receiver’s junk mailbox. Also, try to keep the mail crisp and short. The use of puns, images, or GIFs is encouraged as this helps to grab the attention of the reader.
Thus you see that social media brings forth a new age of travel marketing. Bloggers who invest their efforts in marketing their brand through such platforms stand a better chance of getting public attention and increasing the followership of their blogs.
